Throwing light on the green material bamboo last week in the city on World Bamboo Day (September18), the Centre for Green Building Materials and Technology (CGMBT), in association with the Mahatma Gandhi Institute for Rural Energy and Development (MGIRED), held a two-day workshop.
It was the right reason for bringing together a cross-section of people for acclimatising them to the benefits of using and working with bamboo. “Apart from looking at ways and means to propagate bamboo in the construction world, the workshop brought some basic awareness about the material among villagers, architect-students and orphaned and spastic children from city-based institutions,” said architect Neelam Manjunath of CGMBT.
“Out of the 1,750 species grown in the world, India has 175 varieties, and unfortunately we still import bamboo sticks for the agarbathi industry that uses the largest portion of bamboo,” rues Neelam. In the workshop women were exposed to machines that cut or shred bamboo into micro-thin sticks that are used for agarbathis. “But such thin shredded bamboo could come in handy in several construction activities or interior designery, so learning to do them on machines is a skilled technique that we exposed participants to,” says Neelam.
Bamboo bus-stopA bus-stop was purely built with bamboo, an endeavour of the workshop participants led by bamboo trainer Gurudayal, tocommemorate World Bamboo Day. Nearly 10 orphan children, college students, architects and green enthusiasts from the interiors of Karnataka were involved in the project.
The bamboo bus stop is placed at the Srirampura railway crossing, near Jakkur. With design ideas originating from Neelam Manjunath, the 10 ft. x 10 ft. bus-stop, costing Rs. 1 lakh, consists of an inclusive design model with a bench, space for wheel chair and a dust-bin.
“We want to bring awareness about this modest green material that could be generously used in infrastructure projects,” says Neelam. A bus-stop purely built of bamboo could be a design model for the government to look into more such feasible green ideas, she says. The roof with bamboo mat corrugated sheets would later on be fixed with solar panels for lights. The back is covered with poly-carbonate sheets to reduce the draft of the wind and rain, explains Neelam.
Awareness campaignIt was in 2009 that the NGO, World Bamboo Organisation, started the awareness campaign on September 18 across the world. The Indian market in 2015 is expected to have a demand of Rs.50,000 crore for bamboo in the organised sector, says Neelam.
The ‘Plant a bamboo campaign’ a kind of ice-bucket challenge worked out for increasing bamboo use, is also catching on in the social media, says Neelam.
The idea was brought over by CGMBT and MGIRED for seeing a million bamboo saplings planted before the next Bamboo Day, because “one culm of bamboo gives enough oxygen for the lifetime of a human being.”
Any building can use nearly 70 per cent of bamboo, instead of steel and wood, but at least people can start with 30 per cent usage with doors, windows, furniture, flooring etc., which would set the green build in motion, says Neelam.
